PREFORMA Starts Testing Phase

The third phase of the public pre-commercial procurement launched by PREFORMA started on 16 February 2017, with the virtual kick-off meeting of the testing phase.

PREFORMA (http://www.preforma-project.eu/) is an EU-funded Pre-Commercial Procurement project working on one of the main challenges memory institutions are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data. The project develops three open source conformance checkers that control whether a file complies with standard specifications and with the acceptance criteria of the memory institution. They offer full control of the process of conformity testing of files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives.

After an analysis of the results achieved and of the software released by the three suppliers that completed the prototyping phase in January 2017, the PREFORMA Evaluation Committee decided to award all the three consortia with a contract for the testing phase. This phase will last until end of July 2017.

The three awardees are the veraPDF Consortium (led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association), who is working on the conformance checker for the PDF/A standard for documents; Easy Innova, who is working on the TIFF standard for digital still images; and MediaArea, who is working on a set of open source standards for moving images, namely: the Matroska wrapper, the FFv1 video codec and LPCM for audio streams.

To meet the developers and learn more about the tools, the PREFORMA project invites the digital preservation community to attend the Innovation Workshop which will be held in Padua on 7 march 2017.